With two words, Matt Kaplon capped his courageous speech. Two words to deliver the last line of a short message to his teammates on Drew University’s baseball team, two words finally said out loud, two words trapped too long inside.

I’m gay.

A brief moment of silence followed. And then the overheated campus classroom erupted. Players rushed Kaplon, throwing their arms around him, the din of unexpected celebration filling the cramped space.

“I was a little bit in shock myself that I had done it,” Kaplon, a 21-year-old catcher from Palisades Park, said in a telephone interview with The Record on Tuesday. “I spent so long making sure they didn’t find out, and now I was telling them myself. After the applause and all the hugs, it just solidified that it wasn’t a big deal to the team.”

This was Sunday afternoon, when Drew baseball coach Brian Hirschberg had ostensibly called his players together to draw the lottery for locker selection, but was in fact setting the stage for his senior captain’s coming out party. Just a couple of weeks earlier, Kaplon had told his 31-year-old coach he was gay, and requested permission to tell the team.

“When he asked me what I thought the team’s response would be, I told him he’s earned their respect,” said Hirschberg, whose days playing catcher in Glen Rock led to a career in coaching.

“Matt is Matt. He’s a captain and a leader. This won’t change anything. He will sacrifice anything for the betterment of the team. He’s my go-to guy who wears his captain’s badge proudly. When he talks, everyone listens. When he talks I listen,” Hirschberg said.

The world is listening now, too, and hearing this vital message better than ever. If the sports closet has always been the tightest fit for homosexuals struggling with their identity, we are in the midst of a cultural sea change.

From Jason Collins’ willingness to play as an openly gay man in the NBA to Michael Sam’s courage to enter the NFL Draft with full candor about his sexual identity, the country’s young, gay athletes are finding role models in courage.

When Collins’ new Nets jersey leads the league’s Web sales since he joined the team Monday, when Sam emerges from the NFL Scouting Combine without having his homosexuality brought up by team executives, we begin to see a new sports order in which voices of acceptance drown out fears of intolerance. Brick by brick, this wall is crumbling.

“To be honest, when Jason Collins came out [last April] or when [MLS soccer player] Robbie Rogers did, I wasn’t very accepting of myself at that point,” Kaplon said.

“It helped a little, but definitely, the Michael Sam story in the last couple of weeks helped a lot. I was thinking about doing it, and that was an enormous inspiration. I was thinking, ‘If he’s going into it with people he doesn’t even know in the NFL, then I can do it with people I’ve known for 3½ years.’”

Yet as much as Kaplon knew them, they didn’t really know him. He’d made that impossible by erecting a false wall in front of his true self. It was natural; he’d been doing it for as long as he could remember, only now sharing (first in a Sunday night story on Outsports.com) how he would rebuff the advances of female suitors, even lie to close friends who asked him flat out if he was gay.

But now, as the end of his college years approached, he was no longer satisfied hiding his authentic self. He wanted to leave Drew with teammates really knowing him, just as his family and friends had the opportunity to when he came out to them last Thanksgiving break.

“I’m a little overwhelmed, but everybody has been so very positive. I couldn’t be happier with my decision,” he said. “Now I want to get my message out there. I found that [Outsports] website when I was in a time of need, and I had to use it as a resource to accept myself more. When I met some athletes who happened to be gay, when I understood there are so many athletes who are gay, I want to do the same thing for my friends as Outsports did for me. If I could help one kid with their struggle, I would.”

His next focus, however, is on helping the baseball team he anchors behind the plate.

Third on the Rangers with a .327 batting average last year, the former honorable mention all-Bergen County selection is the glue that holds the squad together. So when he changed the conversation from his revelation back to the business of baseball, his teammates listened. The start of the season is less than two weeks away, and from what Hirschberg can see, the guys are closer than ever.

Kaplon feels it, too, from a Sunday night phone call from one teammate who wanted to take him out to dinner to a Monday afternoon encounter with a freshman, one that underscored the power of this message.

The team was sitting at lunch when the young player unwittingly used what could be considered a homophobic slur.

It wasn’t directed at anyone and Kaplon didn’t hear it, but when he got up to get food, the rest of the team admonished the freshman.

Later that night, Kaplon’s cellphone beeped with a text from the young player, who asked if they could meet.

“He started crying,” Kaplon said. “He said, ‘At lunch I said something without thinking, I couldn’t tell if you heard.’ He was sitting there, telling me he was so upset the entire day, that it bothered him so much he had to call me. It reiterated to me this is changing the culture around me. If I can make it easier for gay athletes to come out, great. But if this also helps straight athletes be more accepting, that’s great too.”

Such is the power of those two courageous words.

By Hirschberg’s count, Kaplon’s speech on Sunday lasted about three minutes. But as we are beginning to understand more than ever, the impact of those words is immeasurable.